Scalable Temporal Anomaly Causality Discovery in Large Systems: Achieving Computational Efficiency with Binary Anomaly Flag Data

Extracting anomaly causality facilitates diagnostics once monitoring systems detect system faults. Identifying anomaly causes in large systems involves investigating a more extensive set of monitoring variables across multiple subsystems. However, learning causal graphs comes with a significant computational burden that restrains the applicability of most existing methods in real-time and large-scale deployments. In addition, modern monitoring applications for large systems often generate large amounts of binary alarm flags, and the distinct characteristics of binary anomaly data -- the meaning of state transition and data sparsity -- challenge existing causality learning mechanisms. This study proposes an anomaly causal discovery approach (AnomalyCD), addressing the accuracy and computational challenges of generating causal graphs from binary flag data sets. The AnomalyCD framework presents several strategies, such as anomaly flag characteristics incorporating causality testing, sparse data and link compression, and edge pruning adjustment approaches. We validate the performance of this framework on two datasets: monitoring sensor data of the readout-box system of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN, and a public data set for information technology monitoring. The results demonstrate the considerable reduction of the computation overhead and moderate enhancement of the accuracy of temporal causal discovery on binary anomaly data sets.

Are you doing better than random guessing? A call for using negative controls when evaluating causal discovery algorithms

New proposals for causal discovery algorithms are typically evaluated using simulations and a few select real data examples with known data generating mechanisms. However, there does not exist a general guideline for how such evaluation studies should be designed, and therefore, comparing results across different studies can be difficult. In this article, we propose a common evaluation baseline by posing the question: Are we doing better than random guessing? For the task of graph skeleton estimation, we derive exact distributional results under random guessing for the expected behavior of a range of typical causal discovery evaluation metrics (including precision and recall). We show that these metrics can achieve very large values under random guessing in certain scenarios, and hence warn against using them without also reporting negative control results, i.e., performance under random guessing. We also propose an exact test of overall skeleton fit, and showcase its use on a real data application. Finally, we propose a general pipeline for using random controls beyond the skeleton estimation task, and apply it both in a simulated example and a real data application.

An efficient search-and-score algorithm for ancestral graphs using multivariate information scores

We propose a greedy search-and-score algorithm for ancestral graphs, which include directed as well as bidirected edges, originating from unobserved latent variables. The normalized likelihood score of ancestral graphs is estimated in terms of multivariate information over relevant ``ac-connected subsets'' of vertices, C, that are connected through collider paths confined to the ancestor set of C. For computational efficiency, the proposed two-step algorithm relies on local information scores limited to the close surrounding vertices of each node (step 1) and edge (step 2). This computational strategy, although restricted to information contributions from ac-connected subsets containing up to two-collider paths, is shown to outperform state-of-the-art causal discovery methods on challenging benchmark datasets.

From Correlation to Causation: Understanding Climate Change through Causal Analysis and LLM Interpretations

This research presents a three-step causal inference framework that integrates correlation analysis, machine learning-based causality discovery, and LLM-driven interpretations to identify socioeconomic factors influencing carbon emissions and contributing to climate change. The approach begins with identifying correlations, progresses to causal analysis, and enhances decision making through LLM-generated inquiries about the context of climate change. The proposed framework offers adaptable solutions that support data-driven policy-making and strategic decision-making in climate-related contexts, uncovering causal relationships within the climate change domain.

The Landscape of Causal Discovery Data: Grounding Causal Discovery in Real-World Applications

Causal discovery aims to automatically uncover causal relationships from data, a capability with significant potential across many scientific disciplines. However, its real-world applications remain limited. Current methods often rely on unrealistic assumptions and are evaluated only on simple synthetic toy datasets, often with inadequate evaluation metrics. In this paper, we substantiate these claims by performing a systematic review of the recent causal discovery literature. We present applications in biology, neuroscience, and Earth sciences - fields where causal discovery holds promise for addressing key challenges. We highlight available simulated and real-world datasets from these domains and discuss common assumption violations that have spurred the development of new methods. Our goal is to encourage the community to adopt better evaluation practices by utilizing realistic datasets and more adequate metrics.

Temporal Causal Discovery in Dynamic Bayesian Networks Using Federated Learning

Traditionally, learning the structure of a Dynamic Bayesian Network has been centralized, with all data pooled in one location. However, in real-world scenarios, data are often dispersed among multiple parties (e.g., companies, devices) that aim to collaboratively learn a Dynamic Bayesian Network while preserving their data privacy and security. In this study, we introduce a federated learning approach for estimating the structure of a Dynamic Bayesian Network from data distributed horizontally across different parties. We propose a distributed structure learning method that leverages continuous optimization so that only model parameters are exchanged during optimization. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets reveal that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques, particularly when there are many clients with limited individual sample sizes.

Causal Discovery by Interventions via Integer Programming

Causal discovery is essential across various scientific fields to uncover causal structures within data. Traditional methods relying on observational data have limitations due to confounding variables. This paper presents an optimization-based approach using integer programming (IP) to design minimal intervention sets that ensure causal structure identifiability. Our method provides exact and modular solutions that can be adjusted to different experimental settings and constraints. We demonstrate its effectiveness through comparative analysis across different settings, demonstrating its applicability and robustness.

Prompting Strategies for Enabling Large Language Models to Infer Causation from Correlation

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are attracting increasing attention. In this work, we focus on causal reasoning and address the task of establishing causal relationships based on correlation information, a highly challenging problem on which several LLMs have shown poor performance. We introduce a prompting strategy for this problem that breaks the original task into fixed subquestions, with each subquestion corresponding to one step of a formal causal discovery algorithm, the PC algorithm. The proposed prompting strategy, PC-SubQ, guides the LLM to follow these algorithmic steps, by sequentially prompting it with one subquestion at a time, augmenting the next subquestion's prompt with the answer to the previous one(s). We evaluate our approach on an existing causal benchmark, Corr2Cause: our experiments indicate a performance improvement across five LLMs when comparing PC-SubQ to baseline prompting strategies. Results are robust to causal query perturbations, when modifying the variable names or paraphrasing the expressions.

Granger Causality Detection with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Discovering causal relationships in time series data is central in many scientific areas, ranging from economics to climate science. Granger causality is a powerful tool for causality detection. However, its original formulation is limited by its linear form and only recently nonlinear machine-learning generalizations have been introduced. This study contributes to the definition of neural Granger causality models by investigating the application of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) in Granger causality detection and comparing their capabilities against multilayer perceptrons (MLP). In this work, we develop a framework called Granger Causality KAN (GC-KAN) along with a tailored training approach designed specifically for Granger causality detection. We test this framework on both Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models and chaotic Lorenz-96 systems, analysing the ability of KANs to sparsify input features by identifying Granger causal relationships, providing a concise yet accurate model for Granger causality detection. Our findings show the potential of KANs to outperform MLPs in discerning interpretable Granger causal relationships, particularly for the ability of identifying sparse Granger causality patterns in high-dimensional settings, and more generally, the potential of AI in causality discovery for the dynamical laws in physical systems.

Differentiable Causal Discovery For Latent Hierarchical Causal Models

Discovering causal structures with latent variables from observational data is a fundamental challenge in causal discovery. Existing methods often rely on constraint-based, iterative discrete searches, limiting their scalability to large numbers of variables. Moreover, these methods frequently assume linearity or invertibility, restricting their applicability to real-world scenarios. We present new theoretical results on the identifiability of nonlinear latent hierarchical causal models, relaxing previous assumptions in literature about the deterministic nature of latent variables and exogenous noise. Building on these insights, we develop a novel differentiable causal discovery algorithm that efficiently estimates the structure of such models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a differentiable causal discovery method for nonlinear latent hierarchical models. Our approach outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and scalability. We demonstrate its practical utility by learning interpretable hierarchical latent structures from high-dimensional image data and demonstrate its effectiveness on downstream tasks.